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One of my dad's own creation; you start off with two stair cases, one is a giant stone staircase that descends into the depths of the land for miles, with each level containing a large arena. The second, a long, wooden, rickety stairs.

The second one also has two signs on/next to it that say "HELL" written in blood. To take these stairs, you will proceed a very long way down... until some pressure plates (the stairs themselves) go off, and unlatch under the entire party (weight dependent on how far you have to go), when you fall, you fall, for eternity, into nothingness.

...

This is what he made many years ago with the original D&D, and there were ever two survivors. Both who made a sign that said "HELL", and placed them before the stairs.

I once had the party (they were 18th level, D&D 3.5) journey through the nine circles of Hell as described in Dante's Inferno. That was a load of fun because they had met a few old villains from way past adventures residing down there. :D

They did really well and managed not to get killed. And were smart enough not to piss off Satan and fight him. They did however have to fight some weird bosses, like a flying invisible evil shark with levels in Barbarian and a Dire Squirrel Swarm.

Can't say I've ever done a journey through hell session. Heck, in my current game, no two characters have the same alignment, so the party would be hard-pressed to even find one another in the afterlife.

On a side note, I have to admire the DM's dedication and talent here. Voicing four distinct characters at once? Not at all easy.

Not quite a journey through hell, but I did once TPK the party in the first session to kick off a campaign.

They'd accidentally gained the ire of the local mob boss and were facing steadily worse odds as he rolled in the heavy hitters. Every time a player died I'd toss a balled up piece of paper at them, containing a description of where they found themselves after dying.

Vast dark cathedral, single desk heaped with books and vials and a single candle, cloaked guy telling them to wait for everyone to get there. You know, the usual.

*one TPK and some mysterious exposition later*

"So if we drink this, we get our lives back?" *considering vial*

"Well, SOMEONE'S lives. Probably. I'm sure you'll work it out."

They woke up on the other side of the wrong planet, and then the universe wanted them to die.

I've had a 13th level (convenient for what ended up happening) LG Hellfire Warlock (9 Lock, 3 Hellfire, 1 Binder for Naberius to offset Con damage), die a horribly painful death while the rest of the party survived, ask his god to send him to Baator instead, end up in Minauros, walk through the Worm of Minauros, then blast his way from there all the way up to Avernus and back to the material plane, killing the devil with ownership over his soul and making himself a new body along the way.

Yeah, heaven is pretty laxed with their rules around who stays and who goes. Heck, our Dragonborn died after falling a 100 feet and slamming into some Blue Ice and Helm saw fit to just throw his resurrected butt back into the party a few sessions later. My cleric didn't even have to beg him to do that. All he did was say that it would be nice if Helm did something for him every once in a while to make up for all the crap he had to go through on a daily basis.

The out of game explanation was that the player for the Dragonborn was the second DM at our game shop and we needed to split the group up so both DMs could get paid. This only lasted for a few sessions though before we had a drop off of people and everyone came together again. On an off-hand note, I've been picking up on a lot of ways to introduce and reintroduce people into the mid point of a campaign. Fun stuff.

I run a game at a college, part of the general Gaming Club. I make sure the game is open to whoever wants to join. I've gotten good at throwing people in on the fly. I've had them join as part of a local army, hired mercenaries, and a couple people were found after being kidnapped by monsters. Good times.

I run a game at a college, part of the general Gaming Club. I make sure the game is open to whoever wants to join. I've gotten good at throwing people in on the fly. I've had them join as part of a local army, hired mercenaries, and a couple people were found after being kidnapped by monsters. Good times.

As it happens, I have just started a D&D (5E) campaign in the Dark Souls 'verse. The premise is that we "volunteered" to go to the realm of the dead to do a task. To get there, we had to die. (A certain goddess was promising a fate worse than death if we declined.) Special rituals were conducted so we would wake up as intact as possible, but even so...

For this campaign, our DM is tweaking "undead" for the mechanics of holy powers and the like: those that still retain their humanity, like the PCs, don't count, those without little humanity left to be NPCs (like most hollows you fight) do. There is something like a SAN track, which will tick down each time we die. Like most PCs, our party will try not to die.

(Naturally, at least one of the PCs seeks to introduce life to this realm.)

Not... Hell, per se, but we did stumble down a rabbit hole and end up following a stone staircase a few miles downward. Going back up wasn't an option, since we found ourselves on an unfamiliar plane almost immediately, not that we understood that detail or knew what the crap was going on.
I'm guessing it was demielemental, since nearly everything down there was related to fire in some way, but there were a couple minor devils and some tieflings too, so evil was involved in some form. A network of sooty caverns, filled with deathtraps we miraculously avoided or bypassed... It was a good introduction to AD&D. We even unexpectedly diplomanced a fire elemental into quitting his job and joining the party. After a while, the master of that realm offered us a way home, and since we thankfully lacked a Paladin to be overly upset at how obviously evil she was, we took the FedEx quest and went home.

I've had two journey through hell sessions in the same campaign. The first was of the type described in 'Spud's author note; a short jaunt to meet with a devil I'd previously called to help the party clear out an infestation of Yog-Sothoth spawn, which ended with selling my soul for a second chance at life. The second was much later in the campaign, and ended with that contract . . . annulled.

Never had one of those. A DM tried once, over powering the party in such an obvious and sadistic manner in order to spawn a "return from the dead" type thing. When my character was killed I knocked over his screen, tossed him bodily out the door, and said to f*@k off. Never spoke to him again.

Yeah, you probably shouldn't have been standing next to the other two then, Scootaloo. Random strangers that are related to the heroes are always main targets for kidnapping. Not to mention that they aren't picky if they nab a few extras along the way. Your just a consolation prize to Chrysalis at this point.

Either that or Chrysalis found out that your the temporally displaced daughter of Rainbow Dash and- *Bang* *Thud*

We've had a couple of trysts with psychopomps and the like, along with some flavorful ressurections, but never a proper hell plot. The real thing I wanted to say here is that our GM has the most terrifying grin as his poker face. he is also very good at using voices, which are really terrifying, especialy since most of the characters he uses them for are godsdamn terrifying, typically with some form of sadism, masochism, mania, or other general terror. Also of note, the GM is my boyfriend, and it's still enough to give me out of character penalties to charisma and intelligence. That said, he's the best GM I've ever known (cast detect bias)